Striatal action-value neurons reconsidered
Abstract
It is generally believed that during economic decisions, striatal neurons represent the values associated with different actions. This hypothesis is based on studies, in which the activity of striatal neurons was measured while the subject was learning to prefer the more rewarding action. Here we show that these publications are subject to at least one of two critical confounds. First, we show that even weak temporal correlations in the neuronal data may result in an erroneous identification of action-value representations. Second, we show that experiments and analyses designed to dissociate action-value representation from the representation of other decision variables cannot do so. We suggest solutions to identifying action-value representation that are not subject to these confounds. Applying one solution to previously identified action-value neurons in the basal ganglia we fail to detect action-value representations. We conclude that the claim that striatal neurons encode action-values must await new experiments and analyses.
Data availability
The data of the basal ganglia recordings from (Ito and Doya 2009) is available online at https://groups.oist.jp/ncu/data and was analyzed with permission from the authors. Motor cortex data (recorded by Oren Peles in Eilon Vaadia's lab) and auditory cortex data (taken from the recordings in (Hershenhoren, Taaseh, Antunes, & Nelken, 2014)) is available at https://github.com/lotem-elber/striatal-action-value-neurons-reconsidered-codes (Elber-Dorozko & Loewenstein 2018). The custom MATLAB scripts used to create simulated neurons and to analyze simulated and recorded neurons are also available at https://github.com/lotem-elber/striatal-action-value-neurons-reconsidered-codes.
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Validation of decision-making models and analysis of decision variables in the rat basal ganglia.Publicly available at webpage of lab.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Israel Science Foundation (757/16)
- Yonatan Loewenstein
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CRC1080)
- Yonatan Loewenstein
Gatsby Charitable Foundation
- Yonatan Loewenstein
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Elber-Dorozko & Loewenstein
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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